Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official eBook

the touch of his great toe the bow flew into a thousand
pieces, which are supposed to have been all taken
up into heaven. Sita became the wife of Ram; and
the popular poem of the Ramayana describes the abduction
of the heroine by the monster king of Ceylon, Ravana,
and her recovery by means of the monkey general Hanuman.
Every word of this poem, the people assured me, was
written, if not by the hand of the Deity himself, at
least by his inspiration, which was the same thing,
and it must, consequently, be true.[8] Ninety-nine
out of a hundred among the Hindoos implicitly believe,
not only every word of this poem, but every word of
every poem that has ever been written in Sanskrit.
If you ask a man whether he really believes any very
egregious absurdity quoted from these books, he replies
with the greatest naivete in the world, ’Is
it not written in the book; and how should it be there
written if not true?’ The Hindoo religion reposes
upon an entire prostration of mind, that continual
and habitual surrender of the reasoning faculties,
which we are accustomed to make occasionally.
While engaged at the theatre, or in the perusal of
works of fiction, we allow the scenes, characters,
and incidents to pass before ’our mind’s
eye’, and move our feelings, without asking,
or stopping a moment to ask, whether they are real
or true. There is only this difference that,
with people of education among us, even in such short
intervals of illusion or abandon, any extravagance
in acting, or flagrant improbability in the fiction,
destroys the charm, breaks the spell by which we have
been so mysteriously bound, stops the smooth current
of sympathetic emotion, and restores us to reason and
to the realities of ordinary life. With the Hindoos,
on the contrary, the greater the improbability, the
more monstrous and preposterous the fiction, the greater
is the charm it has over their minds;[9] and the greater
their learning in the Sanskrit the more are they under
the influence of this charm. Believing all to
be written by the Deity, or by his inspiration, and
the men and things of former days to have been very
different from the men and things of the present day,
and the heroes of these fables to have been demigods,
or people endowed with powers far superior to those
of the ordinary men of their own day, the analogies
of nature are never for a moment considered; nor do
questions of probability, or possibility, according
to those analogies, ever obtrude to dispel the charm
with which they are so pleasingly bound. They
go on through life reading and talking of these monstrous
fictions, which shock the taste and understanding
of other nations, without once questioning the truth
of one single incident, or hearing it questioned.
There was a time, and that not very distant, when
it was the same in England, and in every other European
nation; and there are, I am afraid, some parts of
Europe where it is so still. But the Hindoo faith,
so far as religious questions are concerned, is not
more capacious or absurd than that of the Greeks and
Romans in the days of Socrates and Cicero—­the
only difference is, that among the Hindoos a greater
number of the questions which interest mankind are
brought under the head of religion.